Today, analyzing data is foundational to maintaining the success of a business. Accumulating information over time, generating reports, and performing vital analytics is the cornerstone of measuring the status of a company, especially when effectively interpreting this information can be a critical factor that determines the difference between inadequate and strategic decision-making ability.
Companies need accurate information – the more, the better – and they need the capability to efficiently access and adequately interpret the data they accumulate. As businesses grow over time, financial reporting methods can become less productive, and interpreting massive amounts of data becomes an inhuman task. Every business should routinely analyze its own reporting capabilities, review the efficacy of its processes, and look for opportunities to optimize its financial reporting capabilities.
Here are some of the signs that it might be time to enhance your company’s financial reporting capacity.
Manually Creating Financial Reports
One of the biggest indicators that it is time to upgrade your company’s financial reporting is when the accounting department is still creating financial reports by hand. Manual accounting might work for smaller businesses for a while, but this method quickly becomes ineffective with any substantial growth.
Not only does manual accounting require a significant amount of dedicated labor hours, but the risk of costly human errors is a burden no company needs. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) accounting software, like Sage Intacct, eliminates manual accounting errors through automation and exponentially increases data quantity and quality.
By automating using cross-departmental data, you can expand your reporting impact, as Sage Intacct fully integrates departmental data into a single source of truth for company-wide reporting accuracy.
Financial Data Viewed in Hindsight
Another sure sign that a company’s financial reporting is obsolete is generating hindsight financial reports. It might seem counterintuitive to consider that financial reporting could offer anything other than a view of past performance, but innovations in accounting software have made real-time data reporting a reality.
Sage Intacct’s dashboards process and display vital company data in milliseconds, providing instantly accessible information. Financial Dashboards powered by AI technology produce real-time financial reports that can be trusted as accurate and thorough.
Difficult to Access and Interpret
With Sage Intacct, intelligent report visualizations simplify financial reporting by making the process of interpreting meaning from company data smoother for analysts, investors, and creditors. In other words, accessing reports is intentionally simple for stakeholders.
Financial reports are only useful if they can be easily accessed and intuitively interpreted by stakeholders. Interested parties should not need an advanced degree in mathematics or symbology to know whether a company meets important goals, thresholds, or benchmarks.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and other metrics should be easily identifiable, and comparing performance indicators should be a straightforward process.
In fact, a cloud-based solution like Sage Intacct offers remote access and increased digital security. Those with a vested interest can examine financial reports when they need to with the peace of mind that they are protected from digital vulnerabilities.
Different Software for Different Purposes
Companies need comprehensive ERP solutions that integrate disparate business operations into one homogenous platform. By consolidating these operations, data immediately becomes more accurate, and any task performed by the solution becomes more effective.
If your company still uses an individual software solution like Quickbooks for financial reporting, it’s a sure sign that an upgrade can optimize operations. Using separate software programs for different business purposes is inefficient and generates a significant risk of data transfer errors and cybersecurity breaches.
Company financial statements can report on vast amounts of critical data. With the advanced reporting visualizations provided by Sage Intacct, accessing and interpreting company-wide (or multi-entity) data can be much faster and more effective.
Strategic Decisions
Investing in financial reporting solutions like Sage Intacct is a capital investment that demonstrates a commitment to optimizing your organization’s reporting capabilities.
If financial reporting measures the pulse of a business, then your business leaders need better diagnostic tools to analyze overall business health in this economy. Real-time, accurate and comprehensive reports deliver the information they need to make better strategic decisions, so having the necessary tools readily available is a prerequisite for growing the business.
If you need better financial reporting, an ERP accounting solution like Sage Intacct helps you understand and manage what’s important to your business. Since everything is integrated, you can track not just financial metrics but also analyze crucial business metrics for real-time visibility into the state of your business.
As a Sage Partner, e2b teknologies is a best-in-class provider to move your business to the cloud. Find out more about how e2b and Sage can transform your business and help ignite your financial reporting.
